creating master for copy protect replication

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Brenda,
A couple of thoughts;
Have you tried to activate the trial version you are using with the serial number you have?
I don't know what version 2 is like but most trial products will allow you to enter a serial number and they become the full version automatically.

When Premiere Elements has problems with installation it is usually due to drivers and/or other editing software.
Make sure you have the latest audio and video drivers to start with.

[brenda]

There isn't a way to put the serial number in the test version, unfortunately. I opened a project in the test version and went to the Help menu and found links for "registration", "activation" and "transfer activation" but they're all grayed out.

Today I was speaking to the guy whose name was on the transfer of license documents, which have now been successfully transferred to me. Chris said he never activated it or installed it before selling it on EBay to Enrique, the guy I bought it from. Chris said that maybe Enrique installed it on his computer and activated it, which would prevent me from activating it unless I get the activation transferred. I think that might be what was happening, because the program says it goes on the internet to activate during the installation process, and I never saw anything about activation before the program started rolling back the installation.

I emailed Enrique to see if he activated it. Hopefully that's what the problem is, and I can just get him to transfer the activation to me.

Incidentally, one person at Adobe tech support said Encore 2.0 does not support Vista. I doubt that that's true, since the test version works just fine. Does anybody know whether 2.0 works on Vista?

Brenda

[Bill Hunt]

Encore2 was not "certified" for Vista. Some got it (and P-Pro) to work under Vista, but many had problems. One of the biggest seemed to be with regards to DVD burners not working.

You might want to stop by the Adobe Encore forum and look at some of the issues with Encore2 and Vista. There are probably some "fixes," too.

Good luck,

Hunt

[brenda]

Latest update -

My fiasco with buying a previously owned Encore DVD 2.0 on EBay is still not resolved. The guy I bought it from is not cooperating with me in transferring the activation (he only gave me the paperwork transferring the registration - which worked according to Adobe customer service, but doesn't help me at all since I can't install the full program without activating it). Fortunately I bought it using Paypal, and if this doesn't get resolved very soon I will just file a claim and ask for my money back and buy another one somewhere else. Now I'm kind of leery of buying this program on the internet from some unknown source, but there's no alternative since Adobe doesn't sell it any more. I found several websites that sell Encore 2.0 for about $350, supposedly new in the box, even though the program is several years old. At this point I'm willing to spring for that much money. If anyone knows a reputable source I'd surely appreciate it.

By the way, I really like Encore. After learning Elements, Encore was very intuitive. The test version worked perfectly on Vista, so I can't believe that Vista is the problem.

In the meantime - I still have a few days left on my 30 days use of the trial version, and I have almost finished authoring my project. Right now it's (hopefully) exporting to a DVD for the first time. I'm kind of expecting it to hang up before finishing the burn, because that's the way this program has been working - at least in the test version. Hopefully it's just Adobe's copyright protection obstacles and not glitches in the program.

I only had one troubleshooting question that has vexed me. When I ran the Check Project routine, I was able to eliminate all the errors except one. I have a phantom button 7 on a chapter menu, and I can't find it so I can delete it. It doesn't show up in the layers panel. I can't find it when clicking around on the monitor when the page is displayed. I was wondering if it was because I have 2 parallel menus (each with 6 buttons) which were created by replicating one menu from the other, and I used the same button numbers 1-6 (1-6 in each of the menus) instead of 1-12 (with each menu having discrete numbers?

I just checked the progress on my DVD burn and it looks like it's hanging up. So I guess I have to buy the Encore program again this week.

Thanks again for all of the help!

Brenda

[Bob]

If you followed the steps listed here (http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15281) and Adobe transferred the license to you, you should be able to get customer support to reset the activation status in the activation database. You could then install and activate the product. I'd call Customer Support again and try to get this resolved before spending more for an old version. You may want to escalate to a supervisor if you aren't satisfied with the response.

Good luck!

[Ron]

OT - BTW Brenda, did you receive the looped track that you requested? Just want to know so I can delete it from the server. Thanks!

[Bill Hunt]

Brenda,

Re: your "phantom Button:"

In the Encore Menu Editor, click the "Show Button Routing" Icon at the bottom of that Panel. All of your Buttons will be shown with a "cross," and numbers in the arms of the "cross." These are your Buttons. Note the location of your "phantom Button," and toggle off the Show Button Routing icon. Now, click where you saw your "phantom Button." It should show the bounding box. You can Delete it (Del key).

Another way to do this is to hit Ctrl-a in the Menu Editing Panel. All Buttons will show their bounding boxes. Note the location of the "phantom." Click on it, and the other bounding boxes *should* disappear.

In the above method (second), also look closely at ALL bounding boxes, as you do not want any overlaps. If Check Project does not mention overlaps, you should be good to go.

Also, be aware of two things with Check Project:
1.) some of the messages it will throw are not really errors, but warnings. One of the biggest, and most misunderstood of these is when one has an End Action for say a Timeline, and then has another End Action for a Playlist, where that Timeline is used. The latter will "override" the Timeline's End Action, and the message in Check Project is just that, a "message."
2.) Check Project just looks at the DVD-spec navigation of a Project. It is NOT a "pre-flight" check, like in InDesign. There can still be problems, even with a clean slate in Check Project.

Last, check closely, all Links, Menus, Buttons, Timelines - everything. Look in the Properties Panel for all. You do NOT want any "Overrides" set, anywhere. All Overrides should be "Not Set." Do NOT use Overrides, unless you know exactly what they do, and why you need them. In 99.9% of all Projects, you will never use Overrides, and they can be set in almost every type of Asset. Oh, did I mention that you NEVER want to use Overrides?

Good luck,

Hunt

PS I wish that I had a reliable, honest source for Encore2 for you, but I do not. In case you hit your 30-day trial limit, and cannot get a copy of Encore2, contact me via PM, and I'll gladly use your .NCOR file, with your Assets to output a finished DVD to your exact specs. It would probably take shipping me some data DVD's, but if your deadline allows for snailmail I'm more than willing to help you out. Good luck!

[brenda]

First of all thank you all for all the excellent support! It makes up for the fact that Adobe doesn't support its own products.

And thanks Ron for sending me a loopable "Charge It" which I used during the opening menu and closing credits. Despite having to listen to it over an over while testing my project, I'm not completely sick of it yet. In fact, once I get away from the computer for a while I find myself humming it!

I think I now have at least the theoretical answer to my Encore loading problem. I called Adobe customer service in India again today and found out that I now have 2 activations on my product, and the installation problem is another problem entirely. Although he couldn't help me because it's a tech support issue and Adobe tech support personnel are told to say that Adobe Encore 2.0 is not supported, the friendly rep told me where to look in Adobe forums. The problem is apparently something in Encore's installation process that hits a wall during installation on a Vista system. I ended up printing out pages of workarounds for this very problem. Some of the work-arounds sound like they're over my head, but message number 32 looks simple enough that I'll try it first. (Incidentally, Bill Hunt appeared prominently in a number of the pages.)

I think this problem is going to occur more often as Encore users upgrade to Vista. So here's the adobe forum with the work-arounds: http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc2487a.

Also, while I was on the adobe forums I found a lot of stuff on buttons (again Bill Hunt's name appears frequently) and figured out that maybe the phantom button is hiding under one of my other buttons. It's strange that the button doesn't appear in the layers panel. Or maybe it's just that the bounding box overlaps a bit with another button. I'll try all of the suggestions from Bill.

[Bob]

Did he reset the activation count for you?

[Bill Hunt]

Brenda,

Thanks for the "trip down memory lane." I now recall reading that thread, but it was sometime ago, and as I still am not usinig Vista, had long forgotten it. Glad you pointed this out, as I will probably build a new workstation within the year, and will go with Vista-64, or Win7, depending on what is out then. Have not upgraded from CS2, so I would have been stuck between that rock and the hard place. Now, I know where to turn, if I get to that point and do not have CS4, or CS5, by then.

I cannot recall if I posted to your thread, or to another "phantom Button" thread in the Encore forum, but I'll do it again here. If this is a dupe of something I might have said earlier, I'll try to delete this part:

Double-click on your Menu in the Project Panel. This will open it in the Menu Editor Panel. Now, there are two ways to look at the Buttons (actually three, but I'll get to that one in a minute). First, click on the Show Button Routing icon at the bottom of the Panel. This will bring up a bunch of "crosses" with numbers in the middle and on the arms of the "crosses." These are the Buttons and their Routing. Look there for the "phantom." It should have a higher number in the middle of the "cross," than the others. Also, count up the numbers in the middle. Can you account for all used Buttons? Did you find the "phantom?" If not, click off that icon (toggle) and hit Ctrl-a, for Select All. You'll now see a bounding box for all Buttons. Look closely. You *should* be able to see your "phantom" someplace. I suggested method 1 first, incase your "phantom" is hidden below another. You will get a double "cross." This happens if one is duplicating Buttons. When you Ctrl-c (Copy) and Ctrl-v (Paste), the dupe will overlay the original, exactly. If you forget to drag it away, you have two Buttons perfectly aligned with one another.

Now for #3. In the Layers Panel to the right of the Menu Editing Panel (default setup), you should see all Layers. If you have renamed your Buttons, it'll be easy to spot, because it'll still be named with a number. If you can't spot it, yet, Select each Layer, one at a time. Watch the bounding boxes highlight. Does one appear above/below another, i.e. the same spot? You can do the same in PS, by punching OUT (off) all of the Button Layer Set eyeballs, and activating them one at a time. This will usually reveal the location of the "phantom." One could also go down the list Selecting each Button Layer Set (one at a time), and using the Move Tool. If this reveals another Button lurking, you've found it. If not, hit Ctrl-z (Undo) and move to the next Button Layer Set with the Move Tool. Repeat, as is necessary. For this last test, you will want all eyeballs ON.

As I always both rename my Button Layer Sets and add the Chapter Name, or similar in its Text Layer, I can spot a "phantom" Button in a hurry - it's still called Button x, where "x" is a number.

Good luck on the activation. Hope your reseller is a straightup guy and has been honest with both you and with Adobe. I've only used Tech Support for an installation issue once, and it was a while back. My AI license was about 4 versions old and was for the first version for PC. It's S/N was not in the upgrade program's database - all S/N's had changed greatly. In five minutes, including hold, I had a tech give me a few keystrokes, and was up, running an registered. This was in pre-Activation days, but it could not have been easier. Hope that your experience goes as smoothly as mine did.

Good luck,

Hunt

[brenda]

I'm ready to give up on trying to install/use Encore 2.0 on Vista. I'll start a new thread on that because it's not really about copy protection and replication.

Just to give you a quick update on the questions from the latests posts here - the guy who sold me 2.0 called Adobe tech support and I called Adobe tech support (again) and now they say that I have 2 activations on Encore 2.0. We'll see when I try to install it - after I solve the conflict with Vista issue.

I eliminated the phantom button ONLY by deleting the whole menu, and saving the one I modified using the same template with a different name. There are a bunch of posts by Jeff Bellume on the Adobe forums about NEVER modifying an asset and saving it with the same name once it's imported into an Encore project. I have Jeff's excellent book, so I believe him.

I'll tell you about the Encore Vista conflict issue in another post.

[Bill Hunt]

Weekly, I sign the praises of Jeff's book. I'm sure that many miss it, because of the name, "EncoreDVD2." Still, the vast majority of what he has to say is still pertinant through CS4.

Both Jeff & Neil Wilkes have gotten onto me for doing the "save" of an Asset. They have hammered it into my head that trouble is just around the corner, though I have yet to encounter it. Still, I *hardly* ever do that anymore.

Do you happen to have a copy of your Menu, the one with the "phantom" Button? I'd like to see it, and play with it, if you do.

To date, I have yet to have any problem with a Menu in Encore. I build about â…“, modify something from the Library for â…“ and use Templates that I have created much earlier for the other â…“. Hardly a Project goes by, that I do not Edit in Photoshop, regardless of what the original source of my Menu is. Other than an occasional "quirk" of PS not Saving properly and updating in Encore, never a problem. BTW, when that Save problem comes up (totally random by my observation), I just Save (Ctrl-s) three times. Two doesn't seem to work, but three is the magic number. I still have yet to figure out why this happens sometimes. Now, out of habit, I just make sure to do three Saves, before I close it out of PS - whether it needs it, or not.

Sorry about the Encore2 to Vista. Reading down that article, I felt sure that one of the latter posters had nailed it for you. I am glad that a re-do of the Menu worked. You are not the first person to have a "phantom" Button. Some other "phantom" cases have involved "phantom" Menus. These do not display in the Project Panel, the Flowchart or the Flowchart "Orphanage." No one has yet come up with an explaination for that one either. One poster even sent me his entire Project, that Opened and Burned fine on my Encore2 setup, with NO changes on my part. I sent him back the Burned DVD, but as he needed to make some additional changes to the Project, just started over. This time, no "phantom" Menu!

Let me know if you still have that old Menu,

Hunt

[brenda]

No I don't have the menu with the phantom button - because it didn't exist. I figured it out I think - it was just a relic left behind from a previous version of the menu that I had copied over and saved with the same name.

While learning how to create menus by modifying templates, I ended up messing up one of two menus I made by creating one menu and duplicating it (or saving it to the library as a template - I can't remember which). One of the problems was that the messed up menu had a stray button (button 7). So I deleted menu 1, duplicated menu 2 and modified it to make a new menu 1 - and saved menu 1 with the exact same file name as the original menu 1. Even after I deleted it from the menu, button 7 continued to be listed on the thumbnail for menu 1 on the flowchart, and I could not get it to go away even after disconnecting all the links from the menu and relinking them. The only other place that this relic showed up was when I ran the check project routine. When I clicked on the phantom button 7 that Check Project displayed, it took me to menu 1, which had no button 7. Obviously, Encore was looking for button 7 from the prior (deleted) version of menu 1 which had the same file name.

It would have made no sense at all had I not been used to the similar bug in Elements 4.0. When you modify a project by deleting and replacing an avi file in the project timeline with an avi file of a different name, every time you go to launch the project it asks you where these outmoded files are. Even when they are no longer avi files used in the timeline, the project remembers them somewhere in its innards and wants to know where they are. (I figured out how to get rid of those relics - by deleting them from the project directory too.)

Brenda

[Bill Hunt]

Ah, the mysterious Button 7 syndrome... Must be like room 403, IIRC, at the Hotel Del Coronado, "The Del," in San Diego, CA/USA. That is the room where Kate Morgan, "The Beautiful Stranger," stayed, before she ended her life on a stairway of the hotel. My wife refuses to stay in that room, because of Kate's "phantom." I guess that when a "phantom" gets a foothold on something, a Menu, a Project or a hotel room, they just will not go away!

Glad you got it sorted out. Now, if I can only get my wife back to The Myrtles in St. Francisville, LA/USA - the most "haunted" B&B in North America.

Hunt